“I didn’t think at the time that anyone would want to read this. It was a slum. There was no superstar who overcame all odds. It wasn’t a happy ending. It wasn’t Slum Dog Millionaire.”

Katherine Boo

author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers

First-time author Katherine Boo’s book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, documents the life and times of the 3,000 residents of Annawadi, a slum that sits juxtaposed next to Mumbai’s gleaming new airport. It is a community at the crossroads of the new and old India, where Boo spent the better part of four years documenting the lives of locals such as Abdul, a young garbage collector who sold his daily haul and could discern the best plastics by bending and smelling them.

Boo is a 49-year-old staff writer with The New Yorker and won the Pulitzer Prize while reporting for The Washington Post. The interview has been edited and condensed.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers wasn’t your first attempt at writing a book.

I had this sort of crazy experience of reporting six or seven years in a housing project in the Washington area. I had done a story for The New Yorker and thought there was a book there, but then all of a sudden the people I was writing about starting appearing on Oprah and HBO. It no longer became a story about what life was like in this housing project. It became something else. I just gave it up. I loved writing for The New Yorker and I guess I just didn’t have a burning desire to see something of mine on a bookstore shelf.

The reason I did this one (Beautiful Forevers) as a book and not a magazine piece was that I didn’t know what it was going to be. I couldn’t say, “Hey, New Yorker, I have a great piece.” It was more a curiosity. It was an open question about how did this dramatic increase in India’s wealth and global status affect the status of these communities.

We’ve read a lot about the safety of women in India, both foreign and locals. Did you ever fear for your safety in Annawadi?

There were some issues when I started out. Eventually I felt fairly safe. One distinctive thing about that place was that eyes are on you almost always. There are many people who are watching, but there were definitely times afterward, when I think of places I went, of the crazy people I was meeting in the middle of the night, that I was very stupid. I was very lucky. The only time I felt really scared was in a police station, and then only in retrospect. We were roughed up and intimidated, threatened with arrest. They were going to try to come up with some reason to arrest us, make up something. One of the worst things was I felt I had brought my interpreter into this, jeopardized the safety of my interpreter.

You said in an interview that your first six months in Annawadi were a waste of time.

It wasn’t absolutely, because what I knew after six months was so much more. When this all began I didn’t have a complex understanding of what was happening. I had a very unsophisticated view . . . One example, I didn’t really understand the trade in garbage and waste. I didn’t understand the level of art there was in scavenging. I certainly didn’t understand the layers of corruption.

Your book describes catastrophic injuries and crimes, such as drowned and scalded babies. How close did you come to witnessing this?

I didn’t see it, but there was a terrible scalding of a baby by a drunken father. The baby was terribly ill and they had spent so much money trying to treat the baby’s illness . . . there were a lot of things that happened, tragedies that happened while I was there. One woman died excruciatingly of TB. I didn’t write about all of them. I didn’t want the story to be only the bad things that happen to people, the public-health catastrophe.

How long did it take you to decide on your central characters?

I had started reporting in January, so probably by July. Abdul was arrested after his neighbour Fatima had set herself on fire. (Fatima “the One Leg” lied and told police Abdul and his family had lit her on fire after an argument.) It was disgusting and horrific that Abdul and his family were in the criminal justice system when hundreds of people had witnessed what had happened. I knew I was going to follow that. It gave me a window into the criminal justice. You don’t know at that moment the person will be the central character. You just know it’s an injustice and you’re going to follow it.

You have not yet started your next writing project?

For now I’m spending the money that I made on the book in the community. I’ve been doing it since last September, paying for critical health care, enrolling kids in good private schools, supporting businesses, and I started a job-training program . . . What I’m doing now is very much trying to increase opportunities in the margins.

Would you explain your writing process?

Some of the reviews of my book say when you’re reading it you really feel like you’re in the middle of it. One of the reasons for that was I really used video and audio tape and I wrote sections right after they happened. You do it right away and you aren’t agonizing, “Did this happen? What colour was her dress?” The factual details are resolved and you have more freedom to go to the emotional heart.

Then another issue is structure — how to write this so people can keep track of events and characters as they read them. And I didn’t think at the time that anyone would want to read this. It was a slum. There was no superstar who overcame all odds. It wasn’t a happy ending. It wasn’t Slum Dog Millionaire. So as a writer, you have a choice, do you distort it, or do you make it intimate enough to keep you turning pages even though it’s distressing. It was about real, complicated people sometimes doing better, sometimes doing a little worse. The heroism in it is that the people there keep trying.

Would your book make a good movie?

This book is non-fiction. It’s not a story. If you do it as a film, I wonder if people forget that these are real people. If you make it a film it distances people from the reality of what’s happening. Reporters come into the slum and ask, “Is this real?” And people tell them, “Yes. And it happens in the slum next to us and the one next to that one.” I don’t want people to forget these people are real. They are not actors.